


On Quiet Moments

by MadameReveuse



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Character Death, Drabble, Extremely mild, John's dumb nerd crush, M/M, Merle is just tired, Mild Hurt/Comfort, another one about UST in the parley parlor, at one point John amiibo corners a chess piece, expresses itself in the weirdest ways, so if that's not an incentive to read this idk what is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 11:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14519727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameReveuse/pseuds/MadameReveuse
Summary: Sometimes, what with preventing the apocalypse and conducting parleys, even Merle runs himself ragged.





	On Quiet Moments

**Author's Note:**

> I have work tomorrow and since I'm already anxious, why not post a fic alright
> 
> Just a short one, just to get a feel for these two and how I'm going to write them. I have a number of ideas for fics that will be longer and more firmly in AU territory. This is, let's say, a starting point.
> 
> Feel free to kudos or leave a comment if you liked it, feel free to ignore if not! My next fic will be about vore

Merle was so very tired.

The last cycle had been rough on him, on all of them. The light of creation had plopped down in the middle of a war-torn plane this time, and it had taken a lot out of them all to navigate seemingly endless battlefields in search for it, hiding in trenches, dodging projectiles, getting into skirmishes, the whole deal. Magnus had rushed in and died early, then Lucretia, then Davenport. Merle hated it when Lucretia died. She wasn’t a fighter, and she was just so young, and there was something just so very wrong about it. There had been so many people to heal and never enough energy or time. Merle had barely had time to invoke parley that year, which was why he was doing it early on in this new cycle. Still, even having reformed without any injuries from that year of hell, with his strength intact, he was deeply exhausted.

They hadn’t even gotten the light. Which was probably why John was looking so relaxed and acting so personable and Merle was feeling so very haggard. It was so early in the cycle that he hadn’t even set foot on this year’s plane yet, otherwise he’d be suspecting he was coming down with something that he’d caught there. But he supposed that he was just thoroughly wiped, mentally more than physically. Now he only had to get through a stretch of John’s bullshit, that searing, painful moment of incineration, and then blessed nothing for a while. After a decades-long stretch of dying and being reformed, he had come to think of death as a sort of involuntary and very deep sleep. Not that the prospect of some well-earned rest was making him dread incineration any less.

Dimly he became aware of a voice wafting across the table, trying to get his attention. He raised his head from where he’d leaned it on his hand. “Hmm?”

He was confronted by John’s frown and an impatient gesture at the chess board. “Check, Merle,” John said, and judging by his tone, he’d probably repeated that a few times already.

“Check what?” Merle asked, stifling a yawn.

“Your king’s in danger,” John said in that voice you use to talk to stupid people. “Really, what’s the matter with you today? The game’s subpar, you seem… distracted.”

Merle blinked hard, taking a sip of his water in hopes that it would help him stay alert. “That your question for today?” They hadn’t done the questions yet, Merle had just walked in, plonked down in his seat, and John had wordlessly set up the chess board.

John waved his hand. “Sure, why not, it can be.”

Merle would’ve never expected John to actually go for it. “Really?” he asked. “Why?”

John shrugged elegantly. “Just want to know. No reason to it. There, now you blew your question on this.”

Merle rolled his eyes. “Smug bastard.”

“You haven’t answered me yet.”

Merle sighed. “I’m tired, is all. Last year was pretty wild.”

John nodded. “It was an unruly sort of plane.”

“You’re telling me that? You weren’t down there with us, how would you know?”

John’s frown seemed to deepen. “True enough, I wasn’t _down there_ , but I did absorb the entire thing into my being, gaining intimate knowledge of it. That is what I do. You know that. Merle, are you… feeling well?”

“I’m good, I’m fine,” Merle assured. “Just… look, I’ve had a stressful few years. Stopping the apocalypse, coming here, being killed by you, doing it all over again… gets a bit old, you know. And the whole time we’re talking, I know you’re going to burn me up again with that black fire and it’ll be, well, painful.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” John steepled his fingers, “but let me remark here that it could all end if you just conceded. No more running. No more pain. I could make you very comfortable within me.”

“Gross. Not gonna happen, buddy.”

“I expected you’d say that. But try and be cautious out there nonetheless, will you? We don’t want any repeat of our last parley.”

Merle scratched his head, chuckling a bit. “My guy, I barely even remember the last parley.”

John threw his hands up, but sedately, in that manner he always did. Like he was exasperated, but too apathetic to flip out properly. “Of course you don’t remember! We were here for thirty minutes, and you spent all of them bleeding out. You came in here with an arrow in your shoulder and covered in blood!”

“Ah, yeah. That happened.” Merle did vaguely remember that. He hadn’t bothered with healing himself because it had almost been the end of the year, and John was going to kill him anyway. So what was the use? Of the meeting itself, he remembered only two deft hands hoisting him up into a chair and John’s voice above him, saying something to the effect of ‘ew gross, you’re getting it all over me’.

“And we accomplished nothing, and I foolishly blew my question on ‘do I leave it in or pull it out’.” John seemed genuinely peeved at that.

“You pulled it out, didn’t you.” Merle chuckled a bit. “You pulled the arrow out of the wound, and then I bled out.”

John huffed and glared off to the side. “Well, _I’m_ no healer, how was I supposed to know that you don’t do that?”

“What were you then, if not a healer?”

“No-o, you had your question.” John got out of his seat and sauntered over to the window.

Merle groaned. “Can’t we just have a normal conversation, John? For once?”

John regarded the window in perfect quiet for a moment. The silence was nice, Merle had to admit. What he liked best about parley were the quiet moments he got to share with John sometimes, most often in the middle of a chess game, when neither of them was talking, when they both had their eyes on the board considering the next move. Merle had to admit that sometimes during those moments, he let himself glance up from the board and steal a quick look at John’s face, almost serene in its deep concentration. He gnawed on his lower lip when his pieces were in trouble, which was almost cute to look at. John was an attractive man when he wasn’t talking, Merle found, but that was neither here nor there. The thing was that there was rarely a quiet moment on the Starblaster, what with the twins and Magnus around. Merle loved his family dearly, including their shenanigans, but at his age, a guy came to appreciate a moment of silence and privacy. John could probably relate, he reckoned. Apparently he spent their time apart absorbed in a gigantic, all-consuming blob of gunk, at one with the trillions of other wretched souls that made up the Hunger. If anyone could appreciate a moment alone and apart, it was probably him.

John now turned his head to fix Merle with his intensely focused gaze. “You’re no fun to work with at all today,” he said. “We’re going to have to find a way to de-stress you. These meetings are significantly less worth my while if you keep being like that.”

“I’m fine, though!” Merle sat up a little straighter in his chair. “I’ll try and be less of a downer, hah.” He chuckled, but it was pretty obviously fake. He needed to get a grip. If John decided that Merle wasn’t ‘worth his while’ anymore, parley from here on out was going to be a catastrophe. He really didn’t want to go home and have to tell Lucretia and Davenport and everyone that he had ruined parley by being too grouchy.

“No, I think I want to try something else,” John said. His easy strides were carrying him closer to Merle’s seat, his impeccable dress shoes making no noise on the carpet.

Suddenly John was _behind Merle_ , not a comfortable position to have John be in. Merle craned his head but the high-backed chair made it impossible to see what John was getting up to back there.

“Please just sit still,” John said, and seconds later Merle felt the touch of two cool hands on his bare shoulders. Going into parley shirtless had never bothered him before, but now that John was _touching_ him, it was an entirely different animal.

“What—” he began and was interrupted by a sharp prod to his right shoulder.

“Wow,” John said. “Listen, I’m no expert on dwarven physiology so you need to help me here: is it supposed to be like that or is that tension?”

Now that John mentioned it, Merle’s shoulders did feel like they were simultaneously made of lead and filled with rocks, somehow. “Guess I am a little tense.”

“Hmm. A little.” John dug his thumb into the junction of Merle’s neck and shoulder, into a spot where a tight little sphere of stress seemed to sit, causing a sharp pressure-pain.

“Ow. Ow! Fucking sadist.”

“Don’t complain.” John’s fingers continued their insidious work across Merle’s shoulders, seeking out hard knots of tension and poking and squeezing them into submission. “You’re going to thank me later. Although it has been a while since I’ve last done this, so I don’t know, actually.”

“But you have – ouch – done it.” John’s hands were unyielding, thorough to the point of brutality in kneading Merle’s flesh. But when he withdrew from one spot and moved on to the next, an intense lightness and relief began to flood that much-abused spot. And, well. That was heavenly.

“I have,” John said curtly.

“Oh, may I ask—?”

“There was a man, a long, long time ago. Before… well, before all this. His name was…” John paused for a second, apparently thinking on it. “Huh, what do you know, I can’t remember. I have one very clear memory of lying in a ditch and him being there too, but that seems to be it.”

“What were you - oohhh, ow, okay, yeah, that’s the spot – what were you doing in a ditch, Johnny?”

“I don’t recall,” John said, brushing his knuckles none-too-gently along Merle’s spine, “I suppose I was tossed there along with the nameless guy. People on my home plane frequently took umbrage at- ah, no. Wait. Please don’t try to trick me into answering more questions.”

“Just trying to keep the conversation going.”

“Well, don’t. Be still.”

Merle tried his best to do so for a minute, just letting John systematically work the tension out of him, marveling at this sudden cruel-to-be-kind maneuver. It was perhaps the first time he and John were touching so overtly, or at all. He felt… normal. Soft, smooth, manicured hands. There was no spark of eldritch power in John’s touch; he felt as he looked: like a regular human man. Nothing betrayed the fact that this was the avatar and creator of the Hunger.

Eventually Merle did speak up again. “Your home plane sounds crummy.”

John’s index finger trailed an almost absentminded line up the back of Merle’s neck, slipping for a second into the hair there. His touch left tingles in its wake. “Yeah, good riddance to that shithole.”

Merle perked up in surprise. John had never dropped the calm, level, well-spoken act before.

“What?” John’s hands paused where they were for a second. “Did you think I would have grown so dissatisfied with life as to induce this radical change if everything in the place had been just fine?”

“Suppose not,” Merle muttered. John’s touches were growing lighter and less violent now, rubbing his back and his aching shoulders in a way that felt almost soothing. Merle felt a pleasant, heavy warmth rise within him, especially as John’s right hand slipped into his hair again and started massaging his scalp. A deep, gravelly hum of pleasure escaped him from somewhere deep down his throat before he could help it, and he heard John laugh softly at the sound. There was a faint rustle of cloth as John leaned in, and Merle felt the hand pressing softly into the side of his neck being replaced with lips, then a tongue, then… teeth? a little sharper than they had any right to be.

“What the hell?” Merle said. His own tongue felt strangely heavy in his mouth. “Did you just nip me?”

“Maybe so,” John answered, withdrawing.

Right, so John had just tasted him. What the hell. Merle didn’t find it in himself to care. He was so nicely woozy right now. Perhaps not a safe thing to be anywhere near John. But eh. What was the worst that could happen? Here in this room with his greatest enemy, he was feeling relaxed for the first time in months. Even his eyelids were growing heavy. Maybe not a good idea to rest his eyes right now. But if he just took a second… where was the harm in that…

 

He woke up and the perpetually setting sun outside the window was still in the same spot. It was a bit disorienting. He was curled up in his comfy leather chair and covered with some kind of fabric. It had a faint scent to it like cologne and pine needles and the slightest hint of tobacco, which was nice, so Merle brought it up to his face and inhaled while he shook off the dregs of sleep. He blinked, rubbed at his eyes, looked up and there, across from him at the table as always, was John, doing… _something_ with the chess set. Precisely, shoving the black king piece right into his mouth. He made a quiet, choked sound as he tried to close his lips around it that was either a moan of pleasure or a groan of pain.

“What the—what the fuck?” Merle asked, his voice hoarse with sleep.

John spat out the king and, as it was, coated in his saliva, _he put it back on the chess board_. He turned to Merle and poured him a glass of water from the pitcher. “Oh, you’re up. Here, drink this.”

Merle took a hurried gulp of water. It tasted a bit weird, almost metallic, but perhaps that was just his parched throat. “What the hell?” he said. “I’m going to have to _touch_ those pieces later!”

“I only used my side. And arguably next time it won’t be the same board.”

“ _Why_ were you doing this?”

“Passing the time? I don’t know. The bishops have the nicest mouthfeel,” John volunteered.

“…Right,” Merle said for lack of anything else to say.

John was in his shirtsleeves, Merle noticed, for the first time since they’d met, and he’d loosened his tie a little. So that meant… oh boy. The fabric covering him right now was John’s suit jacket. And he had just unabashedly sniffed it.

It was strange that this weird fly-in-amber replica of John’s body even had a scent.

“So,” Merle said a bit awkwardly. “I really did just fall asleep here, huh?”

John hummed in the affirmative, scrutinizing another chess piece – the queen – and probably wondering how it would feel in his mouth. “You did. It was a bit surprising – I don’t sleep at all anymore.”

“Sorry ‘bout all that.”

“I didn’t mind. At first I thought you’d blacked out again, but then…” his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly, as if suppressing a smile, “you started snoring so I thought it was best to let you be.”

“Well… thanks, I guess.” Merle cleared his throat, sat up and carefully pulled John’s jacket off of himself. “Sorry today wasn’t… very productive.”

John shrugged.

“You’re gonna kill me now, aren’t you?”

John checked his watch. “No, Merle, I’ve killed you just about five minutes ago. Poisoned the water. You did say the fire was too jarring. Is it already setting in? You should feel a kind of buzzing sensation in the extremities.”

Merle’s limbs were definitely buzzing. It felt like both his arms and his legs were asleep.

“Is there going to be any pain?” His lips were feeling numb as well.

“No, just this.” John got up and came over to Merle again, picking up his jacket and refastening his tie, as if he was actually physically going anywhere. “Well, today was… something,” he said, “See you again next year, and take care of yourself in the meantime.”

It sounded almost genuine.

Merle’s entire body was now numb. He couldn’t move or feel any of his limbs. His vision began to blacken rapidly. He tried to say something, but no sound would come out of his mouth.

The last thing he saw was John quickly bending over him, and the last thing he felt was a hand in his hair and the soft brush of… lips? against his temple?

He woke a second time to the concerned faces of his family hovering over him.

“How did it go?” Davenport asked, putting a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“Anything we can work with this time?” Lucretia added, pen already poised, an open journal in her lap.

“He knows how to do a guy a solid,” Merle said.

_He remembers what mercy is,_ Merle thought.


End file.
